Video of Greater Dandenong’s council meeting last week was temporarily off-limits.
The council pulled the video from its YouTube channel soon after the 27 October council meeting, replacing it with a message: “Video Unavailable: This video is private”.
The interruption was due to the need to clean out Microsoft Teams pop-up alerts that intruded into the coverage, according to the council.
The cleaned-up footage with “no edit” to the meeting’s video or audio was republished the following day.
Greater Dandenong chief customer and information officer Yuri Guzman said one of the IT officers facilitating the meeting received some Teams messages during the livestream.
“One of the messages contained private details for a resident.
“In order to protect the resident’s private information, we took the livestream down as soon as the meeting was over.
“That meant anyone watching on delay would have experienced a sudden ‘blackout’.”
Recently, Greater Dandenong reviewed its protocols after audio was muted for most of a live-streamed public meeting in July.
Strategic growth and advocacy executive manager Marjan Hajjari said the July outage was “rare and unexpected”.
The council was reviewing its protocols, strengthening contingency measures and improving communications for any repeat of the technical fault, Hajjari said at the time.
Greater Dandenong council meetings are open for public attendance, as well as live-streamed on the Harmony Square big stream and the council’s social media channel.
